What Helen Wanted
Two or three times I went to visit Helen in Des Moines. She worked there for two summers, you know, and then for a year before starting her PhD studies down in Texas. It was always a big to-do from our end, to get me dressed to the teeth and packed up with treats for myself and for Helen and whatever else Mother thought she needed. I talked her out of the kitten in my handbag but ended up having to lug the twenty pound hair curler.
We'd share a bed while I visited, just like old times, squabbling all night about who was taking up too much space or too many covers. I kid you not I found myself on the floor in the middle of the night. More than once. Just like old times.
Poor thing, most of the time she was so run down by the struggles of a working stiff that she could barely say hello at the end of the day let alone pretend she was happy to see me. It bent me out of shape then but my own times were coming and when I was slaving away in New York, studying all night, attending class all day and somehow scrubbing bedpans for the Amsterdam Avenue hospital in between, I understood how she felt. Not that she was alive anymore for me to say it.
If only she'd lived to a regular old age we could have learned how to be sisters, I think sometimes. Of course, she didn't, so who's to say for sure. She could have gone on getting more and more prissy and ornery the older she got.
She always did have a chip on her shoulder, like she was destined for better things than the rest of us. It was Father that gave her that idea, but she took it and ran. It was never enough for her to win prizes and have the best deportment and the best handwriting, she had to tell you about it, somehow. It drove me batty.
One time, in Des Moines, I finally convinced her to come out with me to a picture. She had half days on Saturdays so Friday evenings she was more carefree than usual. We were coming down the street in our Sunday best, ironed and pressed, and I'd even convinced her to use that twenty pound curling iron. We passed two girls dressed up to look like parrots, red lips, slinky black dresses, beads, bobbed hair--you'd have sworn they stepped straight out of a magazine. Loud and elegant and willowy. Like movie stars. And Helen and I in our plain yellow frocks couldn't help but stare and as we did so one of them said, "Well, I declare--if it isn't the Wright sisters! Fancy meeting up with you!" It was Virginia Laburnam, or as she was calling herself that day, Ginnie. Now Ginnie was in Helen's grade, not mine, but I could remember as well as Helen that Ginnie had never once won a prize, she couldn't read music, and she got more demerits than high marks. Yet here she was, looking like a movie star. Turned out she worked during the day for one of the big law firms in town, a job Helen would have much rather had. Neither of us said a word but when we were going to sleep that night, combing the curl out of our hair, Helen said, "Virginia Laburnam. Who would've thought it. Virginia."
Well, I do go on. Let me know if you think you'll be coming out next month and I'll make up the spare bed and pull out some of our old pictures.
Love,
Aunt Jessie
